Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
(OP)
I realize there are a ton of comments on ethanol. But I ran across a story from a team in Philadelphia that claimed that injecting liquid ethanol into the gasoline engine (probably just before spark ignition occurs), resulted in 20-25% improvement in efficiency (in the engine--not sure if this was engine or dyno tested). I was a bit taken back by this, and I'm curious, can you just change the way the fuel is injected into the cylinder, and recover enough to compensate for the lower heating value in ethanol? It seems counter-intuitive to me, but I thought I'd run this by some experts.





RE: Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
There has been work on using hydrogen as a combustion efficiency improver, but the effects are fairly small, and occur for well understood reasons, which would not apply to ethanol, by and large.
After all, quite a few racing teams would be interested in a 20-25 % power boost, even if those of us who are paid to keep quiet by Big Oil weren't interested.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
Similar calculations were used by Enron...
RE: Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
RE: Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
Direct Injection Ethanol Boosted Gasoline Engines
RE: Ethanol Improves Efficiency in Gasoline Engine?
Well if you look at it this way, one could argue that with a downsized, high boost engine, a similar result could be achieved with water injection (instead of ethanol).